Online Developer Meeting (2024-12-17)

Today's topics[edit]

Release of Octave 9.3.0?
- Rik and Markus helped jwe make the release files.
- There was a problem with asin on Windows (https://octave.discourse.group/t/failing-test-for-mxe-octave-after-crossbuilding-on-fedora-41/6026/80).
- The release should be done by the time of the meeting. This topic is here as a reminder (as if one is needed) to discuss the release process and the asin bug.

Digital Ocean server - load and disc space
- load and used memory was on reasonable levels during the time available on the history provided by Digital Ocean
- disc usage is high
- jwe will increase the size of the extra partition from 5 GB to 10 GB (pricing approx. 1c US-ct per GB per month)

Buildbot availability
- The memory issue of one of the machines running the buildbot workers has been resolved (defective memory bar has been replaced)
- The SSDs have been replaced with larger ones. When copying files from the old to the new SSDs, already some read errors. (The SSDs might have needed to be replaced soon in any case.)
- jwe will look into setting up an autostart of the buildbot worker for nightly.octave.org on startup. That worker is running in a docker container.

Timeline or blockers for Octave 10?
- Issue with new files not being detected immediately after saving in built-in editor. Might be possible to resolve by rehashing the load_path after a new file was saved.
- Rik would like to push changes for mod, rem, and qr for Octave 10

Old problem - windows file timestamps - (bug #31080)
- See above (blockers for Octave 10)

jwe will try to establish weekly "office hours" for developers or users with questions to Octave internals are invited to call in.

Release of Octave 9.3.0?
- Rik volunteered to shadow jwe while he makes release to learn the process. Markus and NickJ may also shadow event if the timing works out.

buildbot: broken synchronization for stable branch?
- Might have fixed itself by restarting the Digital Ocean server. (The server load was above 100 before the restart. Mainly Python and Apache processes again. Still suspecting the Mercurial web interface.) Will monitor the situation.

GitHub mirror:
- broken synchronization for stable branch?
  - Fixed by Kai on Nov. 25th.
- access permissions for organization members?
  - Base access permission for organization members has been changed from "write" to "read". Higher access permissions should be added on a per-repository level if required.

load path and PKG_ADD issues
- Keep allowing arbitrary code execution in PKG_ADD scripts. Try to avoid the use-after-free when addpath is used in PKG_ADDscripts.

future of octave-cli (also: FLTK, and gnuplot graphics)
- Look into moving FLTK and gnuplot graphics toolkits into Octave packages (if that is easy)
- Eventually remove them from core Octave (regardless of whether they can be moved to packages).
- Rename octave-cli to something that indicates that the main difference is that it doesn't link to the Qt libraries. Users of Octave with the CLI should *not* call octave-cli (but octave, potentially calling octave --no-gui) in the vast majority of cases.
- After the "original" octave-cli has been renamed, potentially, add a new wrapper executable named octave-cli that essentially just forwards to octave --no-gui (to avoid potential issues with hard-coded executable names in build scripts or Makefiles).